You think discipline is what keeps you from making impulsive decisions. It is not. The newest neuroscience suggests that repeated exercise may alter the dopamine pathways involved in reward itself. The reward value changes before the behavior changes. The highest performers are not constantly resisting temptation. Their brains have learned to value different things.

Exercise gives you energy even if your expending it contrary to popular belief. Reported weekly by patients too.

During this conversation, @BradSchoenfeld shared something most lifters have never been told. Muscle growth is driven primarily by mechanical tension, not simply the amount of weight on the bar. Research shows that when sets are performed with high effort and close to failure, loads as low as 30% of maximum can produce similar hypertrophy to much heavier training.

“A ketogenic diet for anorexia” You heard that right. A new study published TODAY suggests cutting carbs might help in anorexia. The reason that pairing sounds so paradoxical is that we’re still largely trapped in a framework that views eating disorders as purely psychological phenomena, and assumes restrictive eating should never be treated with a restrictive diet. On the surface, that logic seems reasonable. But one of the most important shifts occurring in psychiatry is the growing recognition that the brain, like every other organ, is fundamentally metabolic. When metabolism goes awry in the brain, the consequences can manifest as psychiatric illness—including eating disorders. From that perspective, it becomes far less surprising that a metabolic therapy such as a ketogenic diet could help treat anorexia nervosa, one of the deadliest psychiatric disorders in existence. Quoting from the author of the research @GuidoFrank “The level of recovery [on a keto diet] was far better than what we see in other anorexia treatments.” Huge kudos to @janellison @BaszuckiGroup for supporting this life-saving work.

Drink your coffee black (no additives) if you want the full health benefits. 2-3 cups per day has been associated with a 25% reduction in all-cause mortality. That benefit goes away when cream and/or sugar are added. I think this happens for a few reasons: • Dairy proteins can bind to coffee’s antioxidants and polyphenols and slow their absorption. • Heavy cream, butter, and MCT-heavy coffee don’t necessarily block coffee polyphenols, but they can add substantial saturated fat and calories. For someone watching ApoB or LDL-C, this can work against the very cardiovascular benefits they’re hoping to get from coffee.

The power of writing things down....

You experience mental fatigue as emotional exhaustion because the brain hides the metabolic problem underneath the psychological one. Creatine increases phosphocreatine availability inside neural tissue. That matters because cognition is an energy conversion process. Some of the people calling themselves burned out are operating with a brain running an energy deficit under extreme demand. That is not mindset. That is bioenergetics.

Timing matters 🕒 For type 2 diabetes, afternoon/evening exercise boosts insulin sensitivity & glycemic control, while morning workouts may raise blood sugar. Later workouts are also linked to lower cortisol, less inflammation & better oxidative capacity. #Diabetes #ExerciseScience @WuTsaiAlliance sciencedirect.com/science/ar…

Your brain physically rewrites itself every time you pick up a pen. Neuroscientists at Norwegian University scanned students' brains while they handwrote letters versus typing the same letters on a keyboard. The results shattered decades of assumptions about how we process information. Handwriting activated massive networks in the sensorimotor cortex, the visual processing centers, and the hippocampus simultaneously. Complex neural symphonies lit up across multiple brain regions, creating rich interconnected pathways between motor control, visual recognition, and memory formation. Typing the same letters? The brain activity looked like someone had dimmed the lights across entire cognitive districts. The neural networks that flourished during handwriting simply went dark. The difference? When you form letters by hand, your brain constructs elaborate spatial maps of each character. The motor cortex learns the precise pressure, angle, and trajectory needed to create an 'A' versus a 'B.' Your visual system tracks the ink flowing from pen to paper in real time. Your parietal lobe integrates hand position with eye movement. Your hippocampus encodes not just what you wrote, but how the writing felt, where you paused, which words required more pressure. Typing activates almost none of that circuitry. You press a key, a letter appears. The motor movement is binary. The visual feedback is uniform. The spatial relationship between thought and symbol gets mediated by a machine that standardizes every character into identical fonts and spacing. Your brain treats these as fundamentally different cognitive tasks. The evolutionary context makes this obvious once you see it. Human hands developed for manipulation, creation, and fine motor control over millions of years. We painted on cave walls, carved bone tools, and shaped clay vessels long before we invented written language. When writing emerged 5,000 years ago, it built on top of existing neural infrastructure that already connected hand movement with symbolic thinking. Keyboards appeared 150 years ago. Touchscreen typing maybe 20 years ago. From an evolutionary timeline perspective, we started using them approximately yesterday. Our brains are still running ancient software that expects physical engagement with symbols. That software produces dramatically different learning outcomes. Students who take handwritten notes consistently outperform students who type the same information on memory tests, comprehension assessments, and creative applications of the material. The difference persists even when researchers account for typing speed, note length, and time spent studying. The act of forming letters by hand forces deeper processing at the moment of information encounter. You cannot handwrite as fast as someone speaks, so your brain must actively filter, summarize, and prioritize information in real time. The motor effort required to form each word creates additional memory traces that typing does not generate. Children who learn to write letters by hand develop reading skills faster than children who learn letters primarily through typing or screen interaction. The sensorimotor experience of creating letterforms helps their brains recognize those same letterforms when they encounter them in text. Adults who handwrite shopping lists, daily schedules, or meeting notes remember the information better than adults who type identical lists into phones or computers. The spatial memory of where you wrote something on a page provides retrieval cues that digital text does not offer. These findings collide directly with how education and work environments have evolved over the past two decades. Schools replaced handwriting instruction with typing classes. Offices converted from paper systems to fully digital workflows. Students take notes on laptops. Professionals draft documents on screens. We optimized for speed and efficiency while accidentally severing the neural pathways that evolution spent millions of years developing. The implications reach beyond memory and learning into fundamental questions about human cognition. If the physical act of forming symbols changes how your brain processes ideas, what happens to thinking itself when you remove the physical component? Digital text is infinitely searchable, instantly editable, and perfectly shareable. But it may be creating brains that process information more superficially, store memories less durably, and connect ideas more weakly than brains that regularly engage in handwriting. The neuroscience suggests we traded cognitive depth for technological convenience without realizing what we were giving up. Some of the most innovative thinkers across history were obsessive handwriters. Darwin kept detailed handwritten journals. Einstein worked through complex theories in handwritten notebooks. Virginia Woolf wrote her novels by hand before transcribing them. Steve Jobs famously took handwritten notes during Apple meetings even as he was building the most advanced computers on Earth. Perhaps they intuited something about the relationship between hand, brain, and insight that we measured in brain scanners but somehow forgot in practice. Your pen is literally a cognitive enhancement device that activates neural networks digital keyboards cannot reach.

F, 51 after seeing her results "You made my day" There is something powerful about metabolic data. She did all the hard work, yet i am lucky to be able to help patients make an informed choice. @MHS_tweeting

Sitting on the floor is one of the single highest-leverage habits you can have for staying mobile into old age The inability to get up and down off the ground unassisted is one of the top reasons people end up in nursing homes, yet most adults haven't practiced it in decades With this, you start restoring the end-range hip, knee, and ankle positions modern life strips away 20–30 minutes a day is all it takes

Neuropathy is not just a BSL problem... #Physiology #RootCause @BenBikmanPhD youtube.com/watch?v=ALmAsxUy…